Thursday, February 08, 2007

It has been almost two months since the official release of the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack, and since then I have been happily coding with little to complain about. Recently, though, I upgraded one of my PCs to Vista Ultimate (only "the best" for my PCs...) and in the process of re-installing Visual Studio and creating some test projects, I discovered some annoyances- both in Visual Studio SP1 and Vista- that I thought I should share in case you're considering the upgrades.

One of the changes in VS2005 SP1 that I hadn't noticed before, is that Visual Studio will now add a hard coded reference to your Web Site's local web.config file for every assembly you've defined in your machine.config. I GAC my r.a.d.controls and put the assembly references in my machine.config so that I don't have to update references in all of my projects when I upgrade the control suite, so I find this "improvement" in SP1 quite annoying (not to mention the fact that it adds 45 - 75 seconds to the time it takes to open your project while VS adds the references to your web.config).

Things aren't much better on the Vista front. As you may know by now, Visual Studio requires an extra update (on top of SP1) to get it to work properly with Vista. Update applied, you'll still have to deal with deciding when you need to run Visual Studio as an "Administrator" (not an "administrator") or when you can just launch it normally. This distinction in Vista between having a user account in the "administrators" group and being the real "Administrator" rears it's ugly head again when you try to add assemblies to the Windows GAC. In XP, you could easily drag and drop assemblies into the GAC making the process of GAC'ing r.a.d.controls very easy. Now you'll get an access denied message and be forced to use the "gacutil" in Administrator mode to add and remove your GAC'd controls. What. A. Waste. Of. Time.

So how do you pick yourself up from these problems and still have a good day coding? I think the latest Apple ad will brighten your day and (if you're already using Vista) help you laugh at your situation.

2
comments:

Anonymous
said...

If it's a developer machine, not shared and not being used by people who don't know what to install and what not to -- disable UAP. Vista without UAP is still more secure than XP SP2, and if your logged in as the Administrator the difference is a dialog for the most part.

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To avoid sounding creepy, I won't describe myself in the 3rd (or even 4th) person. I am Telerik's Chief Evangelist and general all around "community guy." I started this blog as a customer, before joining the company, and now enjoy the best job in the world- helping deliver the good news of Telerik to people around the world and helping Telerik build cool, useful products. I am President of the North Houston .NET User Group, an O'Reilly author, and a Microsoft MVP.